U.S. decision would hit families’ pocketbooks in El Salvador

SAN SEBASTIAN SALITRILLO, El Salvador — Every two weeks, Flor Tovar receives a lifeline in the form of cash wired from her husband living in the United States.

The money pays the $50 rent for her modest two-bedroom home in a low-income housing development about an hour northwest of El Salvador’s capital. It also covers school transportation for their two sons, the electricity, water and cable television.

Now a decision made in Washington to end temporary protected status for her husband and nearly 200,000 other Salvadorans in the U.S. has the 33-year-old Tovar and her sons wondering what a future without that income would look like. Salvadorans with the status have been given until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States or face deportation.

“It is very worrisome. These people don’t have the resources to come back, and the crime is terrible here,” Tovar said Tuesday.

The change would affect only a fraction of the estimated 2 million Salvadorans living the United States. But the effects could be devastating for families like Tovar’s who depend on the money sent home by relatives.

The Trump administration has left the door open for Congress to find a legislative solution that would allow those Salvadorans to remain in the country. Salvadorans living under the temporary protected status received it because earthquakes in 2001 made it difficult for them to return to their country. But Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced Monday that the U.S. has determined that the effects of those quakes are no longer a hurdle to returning.